Hello again,
When I sent the first issue of this newsletter five years ago this month it was because, I wrote at the time, we’d reached the point at which “the new Coronavirus could no longer be ignored.” You’ll have your own memory of when that point arrived for you — when you got on the Covid clock. You might even remember when you stopped hearing it tick. It turns out all crises are like this. Something suddenly makes it impossible for you to carry on as usual; forces you to reckon with it until you either repair the breach in your path or find a new one1.
This isn’t a commemoration. There were some good memorial pieces on the pandemic anniversary this month2, and I didn’t think it was worthwhile for me to write one.
But Covid has come up in so many conversations in my life lately that it’s become, well, hard to ignore. It’s come up mostly not as a memory, but as an echo in the present. It’s come up as a framework for making sense of what’s happening right now. When it comes up people aren’t referring to the ongoing (and possibly much larger than reported) West Texas measles outbreak, or the looming (but still probably remote) threat of a bird flu pandemic.
It isn’t the content that’s familiar, it’s the form. It’s the plunge into a totalizing uncertainty driven by forces beyond your control; the sudden loss of cherished connections, routines, expectations; the lost futures. I remembered a line from a Kim Stanley Robinson essay published in the first spring of the pandemic. “When later shocks strike global civilization,” he wrote, “we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked.” Covid wasn’t a singular event, Robinson wrote, it was “the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.”
The structure of feeling these days is familiar to scientists who are watching the entire apparatus of federally-funded academic research evaporate around them; PhD students and early career researchers whose grants are being cut and labs closed, and who are seeing cohorts of new colleagues disappear as admissions are frozen or rescinded. It’s familiar to government workers who don’t know if their agencies will exist from one day to the next, let alone their particular jobs, and who are being told it’s not only their jobs that are superfluous, but that the vocation of civil service itself has been a waste. It’s familiar to green card holders and people on visas suddenly afraid they’ll be detained or deported without cause or on a technicality. It’s familiar to undocumented immigrants again terrified to be out in public. To Canadians who suddenly find their southern neighbor transformed into an adversary. The feeling is familiar to anyone who finds themselves worrying that a friend, family member, or loved one will vanish or lose their livelihood. It’s that old worry of not knowing when things will ever get back to normal so you can be reunited.
The above wasn’t by any means an exhaustive list, and where your experience intersects or overlaps with it will vary. The Covid pandemic, I wrote back in February of 2021, “became real for people when it started warping parts of the world they knew best.” For many people it happened somewhat slowly, as piece by piece the pandemic came into place. For some, it never did become really real.
The point is that a lot of us are on familiarly unfamiliar ground. It can be an isolating feeling, because it’s hard to put a name to it, hard to know who else is feeling it, and because of these features hard to know how widely shared it is. The social psychologists call this kind of thing “pluralistic ignorance.” We go about our lives believing our individual experience, beliefs, our worries, are unique to us, when actually they’re shared by a great many people around us, each of whom also believe they are alone.
The promise of sociology is to provide a disciplined way out certain varieties of pluralistic ignorance: to help people connect their personal troubles to social issues. Or, as Norbert Elias put it, sociology’s goal is to make the structures and networks of connections that shape our lives “more transparent and thereby … prevent them carrying their members along with them so blindly and arbitrarily.” The surrealist poet Paul Éluard put this ethos more eloquently: “there is another world, but it is in this one.”
Another world, but in this one. The pandemic made the hidden world of social ties and structures more visible to us by disrupting them so comprehensively. For example it’s easy to take for granted how important casual social encounters are to your well-being until they’re gone. Easy to take for granted the network of connections that extend from your family and inner circle through your friends, acquaintances, and strangers, until it turns out your health depends on tracing the spread of a virus through your contacts. It’s easy to take for granted the transcendent power of being in a crowd of people enjoying a concert or a game, or fighting for a common cause, until you find yourself doing it again for the first time after a period of isolation.
So as we go through another moment of social shock it’s worth reaching back and remembering the lessons you learned during the pandemic. A lot of those lessons will be specific to you and your social context: the things that got you through, the things that seemed helpful at the time but in retrospect you realize did more harm than good. You’ll want to go out of your way to connect with other people, to find solidarity, to work together to make changes in the immediate world around you.
Another lesson to remember is how quickly small adjustments can add up to change your entire way of living. I keep thinking back to this story from the first autumn of the pandemic, an NYU psychology professor who related in a viral twitter thread the story of how he ended up trapped in an elevator in his apartment building with his two children trying to teach a lecture to 300 students through his cell phone. An insane situation that would have been unimaginable a year earlier. But, as I wrote at the time: “We move step-wise into the strangest places. Each new adjustment seems to follow logically from the last, until you look back at where you came from and realize you can’t recognize yourself or the world around you, can’t believe you made it from there to here and can’t for the life of you figure out how to get back. Because everything’s too different. And if you’d known this is where you were headed, you would have stopped.”
Today, you can keep a running tally of the steady stream of headlines marking each new time the president “aggressively tests the limits of executive power” or “pushes the boundaries of the rule of law.” Institutions adjust, make little concessions here and there, and then some more, and then some more, hoping that staying quiet now will save them from more grievous losses later. People pass on opportunities to speak up when someone is punished without due process, or when their rights are circumscribed one step at a time. It’s vital to be deliberate about the steps you take or don’t, the adjustments you make or don’t, so that you can avoid being surprised at where you’ve ended up.
A reporter reached out to me a few weeks ago to ask how I thought people should remember Covid. I said the best way would be to remember the first time you saw a friend after the lockdowns, the first time you went to a celebration, to the cinema, to a religious service, to anything that you had been prevented from doing by the virus. It’s a reminder that no matter how dire things sometimes seem, people pull through. A reminder to keep alive your capacity for astonishment at the power of social connection.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter, I encourage you to check out my new newsletter, Memories of the Future, a monthly-or-so publication about how people find their way through a world that keeps producing new species of trouble, and how everyday life is shaped by all our collective efforts to keep from being taken by surprise.
In part, it’s a newsletter about the sociology of risk, disaster, and social change. But it’s also about technology and culture and politics, because the most important thing to keep in mind is that disasters don’t strike out of the blue, they’re the products of the social arrangements we make and remake every day.
The word ‘crisis’ is rooted in the ancient Greek term for a decision, or turning point in a disease, especially a fever, and the word in English had for centuries been associated with illness, specifically a sudden change for better or worse in the condition of a patient, leading to recovery or death.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this CBC radio piece on memorializing the pandemic, in which I’m quoted.